Sometimes an email can drop in to your inbox but appear to have been sent earlier on in the day, sometimes it can even appear to be from later on in the day, and it can be useful to find the cause (if for no other reason that to be sure your mail servers aren’t grinding along). All the information you need is ‘headers’ of the email. These are lines of information added to the email as it passes from one mail server to another and can help show where delays or issues have occured. Quite often your administrator or ISP will ask for the email headers to help diagnose an issue.

Here’s a quick guide to how to retreive the mail headers in Outlook (2003 & 2007).

1) Find the email you want to check and right click it and choose Options from the menu.

Choose Options

2) From the Options dialog that appears highlight the text in the “Internet Headers” section by left clicking at the start of the text and dragging the mouse over the text as you move down. The text will auto-scroll and highlight as it goes. When you are done right click the text and choose Copy. (You can also click the text and press CTL+A to Select All before pressing CTL+C to copy the text).

Internet Headers

3) You can now paste the email headers in to Word or in to an email to send on. In this example we have pasted them in to an email window, but it may be more reliable to paste the headers in to Word.

Emailing the information

You can then send the information on to your, now very grateful, ISP or Administrator.